Via Ad Age, Jan Thompson, the VP of Marketing for Nissan-North America, yesterday called out the auto industry for clinging to "a less risky approach to marketing,", leading to a big disparity in where automakers spend their ad dollars and consumers invest their time.

She added that Nissan is extending its relationships with MSN, Google, and Yahoo!, and pointed out that the automakers now account for a quarter of all annual advertising spending in the nation.

It's easy to see why. Television advertising costs, in particular, continue to skyrocket as the effectiveness of the medium decreases. Dinosaurs that aren't embracing non-traditional forms of marketing are panicking because they can't reach their customers, so they 'go with what they know', and that's 'traditional' advertising, such as the 30-Second spot. The other dinosaurs do the same, and the prices are bidded through the roof. Joe Jaffe had a great point recently that the cost of a 30-second spot during the season for American Idol cost the same as a 30-second spot during the 1998 Super Bowl....yet AI delivered a THIRD of the audience that the SB did.

Thompson added:"enjoy the revolution because we are all at the center of it."

1 Comments:

Well, to be fair to A.I., the commercials were very often placed within the actual show itself, rather than during traditional breaks. Well, at least for Coke and Ford anyway.

Still, the audience of A.I. is a very rabid one (and one that is already Pavlov'ed into being interactive) so I would have to contend that advertising on American Idol would be a lot more about quality versus quantity.